Author: MrM0untfield

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Who shot J.R.R.?

 

© George Allen & Unwin

 

I’ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55).  There…  I’ve said it.

 

When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to 1077 pages.  I stumbled through about 800 pages of it.  Sometimes I left it aside for months and when I returned I had to reread long tracts of it to remind myself what was going on.  Eventually, I abandoned it forever at the bit where Frodo and Sam blunder into the lair of Shelob, the giant spider.  Thus, for years afterwards, I wasn’t entirely sure if (a) Frodo got to complete his quest, and (b) he didn’t end up as giant-spider-food.  Though, given the probability of a happy ending, I assumed that (a) he did, and (b) he didn’t.  Finally, in 2003, I saw Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Return of the King and my assumptions were confirmed.

 

I found Tolkien’s writing style plodding at times, but what really defeated me was the dullness of the characters.  The evil ones (Gollum, Saruman) were interesting, but as far as the good guys were concerned, the ones I was supposed to be rooting for…  Dearie me.  I had hopes for Aragorn early on, in his guise as the enigmatic Strider, but my curiosity soon waned.  Boromir was agreeably conflicted, but he didn’t make it beyond the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.  (In the 2001 movie version, he’s played by Sean Bean, so you know immediately what’s going to happen to him.)  Meanwhile, the Hobbits of the Shire were insufferably bland.  Their nicey-nicey, respectable, know-your-place-and-respect-your-betters manner so annoyed me that I suspected if the Shire had newspapers, the Daily Mail and Daily Express would dominate the market.  Sam Gamgee, tending to Frodo like a batman serving a member of the officer class, was particularly irksome in his cap-doffing.

 

No wonder the fantasy and science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote sourly of Lord of the Rings: “If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence, the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’… and ‘civilised’ behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’.”

 

And though I was a teenager at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that if I read The Lord of the Rings now, I’d have an epiphany, revise my opinion of the trilogy and acclaim it as a masterpiece.  For one thing, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy (1968, 70 & 72) and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946, 50 & 59) around the same time and thought they were brilliant.  Indeed, the first two Gormenghast volumes are among my all-time favourite books.  Also back then, I tried reading Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), which is sometimes credited with kickstarting the ‘grimdark’ movement in modern fantasy – more on that in a moment – and thought it was dreadful shite, an assessment shared by many people whose judgement I trust.  So I doubt if my evaluation of Tolkien today would be any different.

 

© Penguin Books

 

I should add that I never had a problem with the Lord of the Rings movies.  However, I generally see literature as a denser, more complicated and more profound medium than cinema.  And though something might seem a bit staid when written on the page, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be ineffective in the less demanding medium of images and sounds that greets you when you enter a cinema or log into a movie-streaming service.  For me, Lord of the Rings was perfectly palatable as a series of two-to-three-hour viewing experiences where you could enjoy the performances of some great actors and actresses (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee et al), the stunning New Zealand scenery and Peter Jackson’s obvious flair for orchestrating action and spectacle.  They contained too much CGI, of course, but that goes without saying these days.

 

So, why am I writing this?  Well, last month saw the publication of an essay entitled Grimdull in the Critic, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘monthly British political and cultural magazine’ whose contributors ‘include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young’.  The swivel-eyed loopiness of three of those four contributors should give you an idea of where the Critic stands on the political spectrum.  The essay’s writer Sebastian Milbank – also The Critic’s executive editor – says this of the author of Lord of the Rings:

 

“Those who followed Tolkien, even from a commercial perspective, understood that modern fantasy was following in his wake; he gave a sense of moral and literary seriousness to the building of imaginary worlds, which would otherwise be absorbed into moralistic allegory or semi-comical whimsy.  Tolkien’s world feels ‘real’ not only because of his attention to detail, but because he builds a sense of emotionally freighted history and recognisable moral stakes, set out in a language strange enough to be compelling, familiar enough to be taken seriously.”

 

Alas for Tolkien’s worthy legacy, Milbank argues, modern fantasy writing has been taken over and corrupted by grimdark, ‘a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings’, popularized by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and the blockbusting, blood-tits-and-dragons-meister that is George R.R. Martin.  “It’s a genre…” Milbank bellyaches, “generally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance.  Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive.  Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen.  Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed… as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it.  Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.”

 

© Bantam Books

 

Even worse, laments Milbank, it’s all the fault of the liberal left.  “It’s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative ‘industries’.”

 

Who shot J.R.R.?  Those lefty grimdark degenerates did!  Basically, Milbank’s trying to open another front in the culture wars.  This time it’s evil, modern fantasy writers versus the decent, traditional, conservative values embodied by Tolkien.

 

So much is wrong in his analysis that I don’t have time to detail it all here.  I’d direct you, though, to this recent riposte penned by the writer Cora Buhlert.  Firstly, she takes Milbank to task for his many omissions, made either through ignorance of fantasy literature or through disingenuity.  In presenting the field as a simple battleground between Tolkien and grimdark, he ignores Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and the copious fantasy writing that went on in the old American pulp magazines, by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore, which helped popularize the sub-genre of sword and sorcery and gave us the character of Conan the Barbarian.  Simultaneously, Buhlert notes, no mention is made of other trends in modern fantasy writing, such as hopepunk, cosy fantasy or romantasy.

 

Indeed, she points out how Milbank doesn’t so much move the goalposts in his definition of grimdark as go sprinting off with the goalposts over his shoulders.  In the course of his tortured polemic, he refers to TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-22), Boardwalk Empire (2010-14) and Breaking Bad (2008-13) and superhero movies like Captain America: Civil War (2016).  Two of those examples aren’t remotely classifiable as fantasy – unless I remember wrongly and Walter White was actually an Orc – while the other two have nothing to do with the literature, set in medieval fantasy worlds, that he’s allegedly writing about.

 

Milbank also takes potshots at Philip Pullman, even though, as Buhlert observes, books like Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) aren’t grimdark either.  Presumably, Pullman gets a mention because, as a famous atheist, he’s a red flag to a bull as far as crazed Christian-morality-campaigners are concerned.  (“Philip Pullman is a stupid, delusional, immoral, inhuman piece of garbage, while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were geniuses, amazing authors, and great human beings,” declared one comment I read on an American fantasy website recently.)  And predictably, he slates Michael Moorcock for being ‘terribly dated’ in his anti-establishment views.  Strangely, considering how Moorcock’s fantasy stories have greatly influenced the modern fantasy genre too, Milbank attacks him using the example of his 1966 novella Behold the Man, which is actually a work of science fiction.

 

One other serious flaw that Buhlert identifies in Milbank’s essay is his implication that Tolkien popularised fantasy fiction in one fell swoop in the 1950s.  But it wasn’t until the 1960s, when Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback in the USA, and possibly not until the 1970s, when imitators like Terry Brooks began to publish doorstop-sized ‘high-fantasy’ trilogies of their own, that Tolkien’s influence really began to be felt.

 

© Overlook Press

 

I’d add that when I was a teenager it wasn’t just me and Michael Moorcock who disliked Tolkien.  I got the impression he wasn’t particularly valued by the literary establishment – whose posh, starchy gatekeepers at the time are probably the sort of chaps whom the young-fogeyish Milbank looks back on with great admiration.  Indeed, Edmund Wilson famously dismissed Lord of the Rings as ‘a children’s book that somehow got out of hand’, ‘an overgrown fairy story’, ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’.  Anthony Burgess conspicuously failed to mention it in his volume Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, though he was broadminded enough to include science-fiction and fantasy books by and / or authors like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Alasdair Gray, George Orwell, Keith Roberts, T.H. White and, yes, Mervyn Peake in his list.

 

Cora Buhlert complains that Milbank’s essay “feels as if it time-travelled here from the early 2010s…  Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?”  Actually, I get the impression he probably did write the thing about a decade ago, perhaps as a moan against the then astronomical popularity of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) TV series.  But, recognising the essay’s myriad shortcomings, he left it on the shelf – until now.

 

Because today we live in a time where Britain’s Conservative Party politicians, and their hordes of supporters who infest the mainly right-wing British media, are aware that, if the opinion polls and by-election results are to be believed, they’re in for a massive humping at the next general election.  So dismal have the Conservatives’ 14 years in government been that their only strategy now is to try and ignite, and fight, a massive culture war on all fronts imaginable.

 

Thus, we’ve had ex-Tory-prime minister, and catastrophe, Liz Truss – her with the shelf-life of a lettuce – raving about her premiership being sabotaged by ‘trans-activists’ in the civil service.  Former Deputy Conservative Party Chairman ‘30p’ Lee Anderson claiming that London’s Labour Party mayor is in the pocket of ‘Islamists’.  Neil Oliver ranting about vaccines on far-right channel GB News.  The Daily Mail dismissing young people’s mental health problems as ‘snowflakery’.  The police, the universities, the judiciary, the National Trust, Net Zero, speed restrictions, the English football team, TV sitcoms, Doctor Who, James Bond, you name it, British right-wingers have tried to pick a fight with it, often for the sin of being ‘woke’.

 

It was just a matter of time before they got around to modern fantasy literature.  Hence, Tolkien’s been weaponized.

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

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The magnificent Seven Moons

 

© Sort Of Books

 

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.  The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

 

  • Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020.  Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read.  One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

 

  • Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch.  Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original.  Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending.  But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

 

  • Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013.  Parts of this 19th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places.  Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

 

  • Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986.  Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

 

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day.  No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel.  It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages.  That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the  things I now miss most about the place.

 

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in.  Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

 

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost.  He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds.  The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

 

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened.  As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered.  And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

 

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

 

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants.  In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man.  In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Deshan Tennekoon

 

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed.  But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement.  It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements.  Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour.  For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan.  Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

 

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”  In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

 

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War.  This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.”  These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then.  It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

 

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s.  “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents.  But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms.  We all pray it stays that way.”

 

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example.  Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).  Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost.  (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie.  It came out in 1990.)

 

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

 

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury.  I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space.  It’s the perfect hiding place.  Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.

 

© EMI / Elektra

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A water garden, plus ghouls

 

 

Another holiday dispatch from Bali…

 

After the atmospheric, scenic but heavily tourist-orientated experience of Bali’s Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to visit Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden (or Water Palace, depending on which travel book or website you read) in the same area.  You weren’t shepherded around, you didn’t have to queue, the be-all and end-all of the place wasn’t to have some cute pictures of yourself taken that you could slather over your social media pages.  Although, inevitably, there were some folk at the Water Garden obsessed with taking cute pictures of themselves.

 

Rather, this was a place where you could wander freely and immerse yourself in the gorgeous surroundings – whilst keeping a sensible distance from the selfie-fanatics.  Also, for a morbid creature like myself, there were some unexpectedly dark things lurking in a back corner of the site, which I found fascinating.  More on those later.

 

The antiquity of the garden’s appearance hides the fact that it’s a relatively recent construction.  It was designed and built by the King of Karangsem in the late 1940s.  (So enthusiastic was the King about the project that he literally built it, for he was one of the labourers digging out its pools and ponds.)  However, despite its modernity, it already has a history of being razed and ruined.  In 1963, the nearby volcano Mount Agung, the scenic backdrop for the countless photographs being taken at Lempuyang Temple, erupted and destroyed it, and it had to be rebuilt.

 

 

After passing through the entrance, which contained a tall, narrow candi–bentar-style gateway with different-coloured, florally-patterned ceramic plates embedded in its brickwork like lines of giant buttons, we descended into the garden.  Across to the left was South Pond, a large, rectangular body of water with a long, thin island stretched across its middle, almost dividing it in two.  The island had the dramatic name of Demon Island, although rather than demons the only things on it were a row of fountains.  The bridges attaching Demon Island to the ‘mainland’ at either end were decorated with dragon-cum-sea-serpent creatures with scaly, rippling bodies.

 

 

The garden’s main attraction, however, was to the right of the entrance steps and paths.  This was the smaller but more ornate Mahabharata Pond, whose attractions were threefold.  First, its waters were full of grey and pink carp, some of them truly big and torpedo-like.  People were buying bread and throwing chunks of it at the carp, causing much tumultuous splashing as they surged up to feed.  Secondly, the pond’s surface was dotted with statues, maybe four or five-feet tall, depicting sitting or crouching figures in elaborate Balinese headgear.  They were slightly dilapidated, in a picturesque way.  Their white surfaces were partly discoloured and scabbed with flaking grey or brown lichen.  Little fern-like plants sprouted from their bases just above the waterline.  Their faces occasionally had so many blotches they resembled Harlequin masks.

 

 

And thirdly, running along the pond’s surface and threading between the statues were lines of stepping stones.  Really, these were the tops of octagonal stone pillars standing on the pond’s bed, which poked a couple of inches above the water.  Needless to say, the stepping stones were a big draw for the photo-obsessed visitors and lots of people were posing for pictures on them.  Sometimes couples tried to pose together on the same stone and looked in serious danger of tipping over into the pond.  I assumed the carp weren’t carnivorous.

 

 

The garden’s other features included a handful of further ponds and pools, an amphitheatre and an auditorium.  But the most impressive item was Nawa Sanga Fountain, which stood at the far end of Mahabharata Pond and resembled a tall, slim, eight-tiered pagoda.  Seen from a distance, the water weeping past the edges of its tiers enclosed it in a shimmering halo.  Green, mouldy growths had gathered on the eternally-wet segments between the tiers, but somehow the mould didn’t diminish its elegance.

 

 

Oddly, the accounts of Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden I’ve read online have all failed to mention something I discovered at the far right-hand corner of the premises.  This was a compound that had at its centre a ring of seven statues, presumably representing Balinese and / or Hindu deities.  Four of the seven, endowed with physical attributes typical of deities in this part of the world, such as having four  arms, or having three faces, or having unfeasibly big hands, looked fairly innocuous.  Their faces were serene, their heads topped with Balinese crowns or tiaras.  But the other three statues were, frankly, monstrous.

 

In the notes I made at the time, I described one as having ‘…splayed, scalpel-ended fingers… a skirt of long, dangling things, like headless snakes… a mouth gaping horribly, a tongue pouring out of it… goggling eyes, long, matted hair’ and looking ‘…like a marauding zombie.’  Another, I wrote, was ‘…less monstrous…’ but ‘…still alarming… like a particularly rabid vampire…’ with ‘…a gaping mouth, snaking tongue…’ and ‘…long, scratchy fingers.’  Its hands were like ‘…clusters of carrots, Nosferatu-style.’

 

 

The third statue was ‘…a truly ghastly thing…’ with ‘…fingers so long and sharp its hands resembled tree-roots.’  It was ‘…seemingly neckless and shoulder-less, its head a mound of horribleness piled on top of its torso.’  The head had ‘…a mane of long, worm-like things…’ that I wasn’t sure were supposed to be ‘…weird, sprouting growths or just tresses of (very manky) hair.’  Its mouth contained ‘…a big row of upper teeth…’ and a ‘…protruding tongue bifurcating and bifurcating again until it resembled a cluster of starfish.’  This shambling creature would have given H.P. Lovecraft sleepless nights.

 

 

On the site’s map, I think the compound was described as a ‘meditation centre’.  I would have found it difficult to meditate there in the presence of three of its residents.

 

And that was my unexpectedly-creepy last port of call in the grounds of the otherwise beguiling and decorous Tirta Gangga Garden Royal Water Garden.

 

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Daphne’s up the creek

 

© Penguin Books

 

Daphne du Maurier’s 1941 novel Frenchman’s Creek comes nowhere near the standard of her best work.  It lacks the growing unease, troubling ambiguity and general intensity of, say, Rebecca (1938) or My Cousin Rachel (1951).  Even as a historical potboiler, it falls far short of Jamaica Inn (1936) because it doesn’t have a main character as monstrously memorable as Jamaica Inn’s villain, Joss Merlyn.

 

That said, with its twists and turns and skin-of-the-teeth escapes and rescues (predictable though they were), I found the book enjoyable as an undemanding romp.  Also, its cultural politics seem amusingly ironic when viewed through the prism of 2024 Britain, insecure at home and diminished abroad after the fiasco of Brexit.

 

Frenchman’s Creek starts with its heroine Dona St Columb, basically a 17th-century desperate housewife, fleeing London for the wilds of Cornwall.  Dona has been living it up in the capital with her doltish and drunken husband Harry and his circle of friends, but now she finds their company monotonous and shallow.  Among them, only the smooth and confident Rockingham has much personality, but as he flirts aggressively with Dona behind her husband’s back and even enlists her help in perpetrating a cruel joke against an elderly Countess – they terrify the old dear one night by disguising themselves as highwaymen, stopping her coach and pretending to rob her – he’s obviously a bad ’un.

 

Thus, bored and disgusted, Dona leaves Harry behind and travels to his country estate on the Cornish coast, hoping to lead a quiet life.  This doesn’t happen, of course.  One of her landowner neighbours, Godolphin – who’s as oafish as her husband and suffers the additional disadvantages of having ‘bulbous eyes’ and a ‘growth on the end of his nose’ – informs her that the local countryside is in uproar, thanks to raids being carried out by a French pirate-ship, captained by a figure known only as ‘the Frenchman’.  Meanwhile, Dona is puzzled to find the estate emptied of its servants, save for one enigmatic character called William, ‘with a button mouth and a curiously white face’, speaking with ‘a curious accent, at least she supposed it was Cornish’.

 

It soon transpires that William is in the employ of the Frenchman, and his ship La Mouette – The Seagull – is anchored within Harry’s estate, in a hidden creek off the side of an estuary.  The pirates have been sneakily hiding there between their assaults on the neighbouring coastline.  Dona falls into their clutches, but discovers that – quelle surprise! – the Frenchman, one Jean-Benoit Aubéry, is actually a dashing fellow.  As well as having the requisite amounts of tallness, darkness and handsomeness, he wears ‘his own hair, as men used to do, instead of the ridiculous curled wigs that had become the fashion…’  (Needless to say, all the pompous Englishmen Dona knows wear wigs.)  Even better, he has an artistic temperament – he loves drawing pictures – and he’s at one with nature – his pictures are of herons, sanderlings, herring-gulls and other birdlife.

 

Trusting Dona to keep her mouth shut, Jean-Benoit releases her from captivity.  And before you know it, romance blossoms between the two of them.  Not only is she inviting him up for dinner at her husband’s manor house, and he taking her on fishing expeditions, but she becomes a member of his crew.  She’s on board La Mouette when it sallies forth from the creek, in search of booty.  She even takes part in the raids on her neighbours’ coffers.  Meanwhile, as one of the local gentry, Dona gets to hear all the plans Godolphin and his fellow landowners are hatching to trap and catch the Frenchman.  The Englishmen never imagine that one of the supposedly silly, frivolous women in their company is secretly channeling this information to their enemy.

 

For a while, Dona lives the dream.  She enjoys the charms of a hunky, creative and sensitive man and gets to participate in swashbuckling adventures.  Then, however, Harry arrives from London to aid his neighbours in their efforts to apprehend the Frenchman – never suspecting that the naughty pirate is holed up in the nearby creek, right under his nose.  Also, he brings Rockingham with him, and it’s his shrewd, caddish friend who begins to smell a rat…

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

 

It’s fun to speculate on the audience de Maurier had in mind for this tosh.  Frustrated 1940s English ladies, fantasizing about a hot-blooded continental man whisking them away from their humdrum middle-class lives?  Especially, whisking them away from their repressed, pipe-smoking, cardigan-and-slipper-wearing husbands, chaps who probably found David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) a bit too raunchy?

 

Maybe she was trying to exploit an inferiority complex that lurks in the British psyche regarding the French.  Well, in the English psyche – mention ‘France’ to Scottish people and many will simply enthuse about ‘The Auld Alliance’.  There’s always been a feeling that compared to the average English bloke, the average French bloke is more suave, elegant, cultured and aware of what it takes to sweep les dames off their feet.  (Mind you, the recent publicity surrounding the 20-stone horribleness that is Gerard Depardieu suggests that French male superiority in the charm stakes is just a myth.)

 

As a recent example of this Anglo-insecurity, when faced with Gallic masculinity, look at the anger with which Britain’s stupidest right-wing newspapers reacted to French president Emmanuel Macron turning up in London for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022.  Macron – of whom, I should say, I’m not usually a fan – wore sunglasses, a blue blazer and blue trainers and came accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards who strutted with nonchalant Jean Reno-style coolness.  He was accused of being disrespectful with his ‘casual’ attire, but come on…  The real issue was cringing English jealousy.  Compare Macron’s chicness with the appearance of former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who shambled to the funeral looking like a cross between an ambulatory compost heap and an electrocuted yeti.

 

No doubt this inferiority complex towards the French (and all things continental) has been compounded by the Brexit vote, which has left England / Britain on the fringes of Europe, looking rather daft and deluded.

 

Frenchman’s Creek was filmed in 1944, in a now-forgotten production whose one point of interest is that it was the only time Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce appeared together in a film that wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes adventure.  It’d be interesting, though, to have the book filmed again in the 2020s.  You could have some hot young French actor like Pio Marmaï or François Civil in the role of the Frenchman.  Matt Lucas, channeling Boris Johnson, could be cast as Harry, Dona’s hapless husband; and Matt Smith – in psycho mode, rather than Doctor mode – cast as the alluring but nasty Rockingham.  A range of bumbling and grotesque character-actors like Eddie Marson, Tom Hollander, Nick Frost and Reece Shearsmith could play Godolphin and the other English landowners.  

 

I suspect desperate housewives all over Middle England would flock to see a new Frenchman’s Creek movie; even while ridiculous newspapers like the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph fulminated at how it cast aspersions on the manliness of Dear Old Blighty.

 

Before I finish, I should mention that the pleasure you get from Frenchman’s Creek possibly depends on how much you can tolerate the character of Dona.  I didn’t mind her, spoilt and self-centred though she obviously was, and just got on with enjoying the book’s narrative drive and historical colour.  However, my partner – Mrs Blood and Porridge – also read the novel and detested it.  This was due to Dona, whom she described as “insipid and childish… she’d marry a prisoner on death row because she’s rebelling against her oh-so-boring life… Meanwhile, people are starving and the bitch is f**king a murderer because it’s fun as long as she can luxuriate in her white upper-class ‘lady’ privileges.  She’s an abomination.  I hate her… her lack of a moral compass and her inability to imagine anything more for herself than a man.”

 

So, that’s me told, then.

 

© Paramount Pictures

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Some archery with Jim Mountfield

 

© The Sirens Call

 

Underneath the Arches, a short horror story I wrote a long time ago, is among the 167 pieces of fiction and poetry that appear in the newly-published Winter 2023 / 2024 edition of the magazine The Sirens Call.  The story was inspired by the arched cavities along the western side of the graveyard behind the Church of St John the Evangelist, which stands at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road in central Edinburgh.  In August each year – Edinburgh Festival time – the church’s grounds become the home of an art, crafts and design fair.  Stalls set up shop in the area between the church and its graves of illustrious, well-heeled Edinburgh citizens of times past.  According to its Facebook account, this is now known as the West End Fair.

 

What caught my fancy when I first encountered the St John’s craft fair in the late 20th century was how those western arches, underneath Lothian Road, had been drafted into use too.  During August, they became mini-shops, out of which vendors sold their wares to the market’s customers.  Thus inspired, I wrote a macabre story about a young man who buys something from one of the arches and, inevitably, lives to regret it.  (Hint: the market is sited in a graveyard…  A place of the dead!)

 

When I was looking for something to submit to the latest edition of The Sirens Call, I stumbled across Underneath the Arches on my computer’s hard drive.  Talk about a blast from the past.  It’d obviously been written by a much younger version of myself, angsty, pretentious, and in thrall to Edgar Allan Poe (and, indeed, Franz Kafka).  Predictably, the story itself was pompous and overwrought, ridden with adjectives, adverbs, metaphors and similes.  I ended up cutting about 2000 words – 45 percent of its original length – out of it before I submitted it.

 

Reading it now, I have to say I wish I’d been even more stringent in my editing of it.  There’s a sentence at the end where the word ‘ridge’ is used twice, and I manage to use ‘seemed to’ three times in the opening paragraphs.  (Coincidentally, the editor of a different publication recently told me: “Mark Twain famously said; ‘Anytime you have the urge to write the word ‘just’, use ‘damn’ instead, that way your editor will remove it for you.’ The same is true of the phrase ‘seemed to’.”)

 

Anyway, no matter.  As usual with my horror stories, Underneath the Arches appears under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield.  And available for free, with all sorts of ghoulish goodies loaded into its 253 pages, the new issue of The Sirens Call is a rare bargain these days.  You can download it here.

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Some fleeting success for Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

The January 2024 edition – Issue 144 – of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is now available online and it contains a new story by Rab Foster entitled The Fleet of Lamvula.  Rab Foster is the alias by which I write fantasy fiction and, by my calculations, The Fleet of Lamvula is the 20th piece of fiction I’ve had published under that name.

 

The first Rab Foster story to get into print was one called The Water Garden, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Sorcerous Signals in 2010.  Back then, I thought fantasy – and particularly the sub-genre of it I enjoyed most, sword and sorcery – was something I might experiment with once or twice, but no more than that.  I certainly didn’t expect it to develop into a major strand of my writing, which it is today.  One thing that’s helped is the fact that there are a lot more outlets publishing sword and sorcery in 2024.  There seemed to be hardly any back then.  Let’s hope this happy situation continues.

 

The Fleet of Lamvula, to quote Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s new editorial, “is the tale of a band of mercenaries exploring a pirate fleet stranded on the bottom of a dried-up sea.”  The original idea for the story was an image of some explorers on camel-back crossing a psychedelically-coloured desert – the ‘dried-up sea’ angle hadn’t occurred to me yet – under a psychedelically-starry sky.  This image came to me one day while I was listening to the trippiest song of all time, 1970’s Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

 

Also shaping the story was the fact that I’m a sucker for ‘graveyards of lost ships’ stories.  Ships’ graveyards exist in real life, of course, but I find fantastical, fictional examples of them irresistible.  For instance, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the 1968 Hammer movie The Lost Continent, wherein a tramp steamer full of British character actors wanders into a Sargasso Sea ridden with marooned ships, monster crabs, monster octopi, carnivorous seaweed and the murderous descendants of Spanish Conquistadores, was the best thing ever.  The dreamy, Hammond-organ-heavy theme song by the Peddlers has a certain charm too.  I also love an outer-space variation on this trope, the episode Dragon’s Domain from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).  This had the crew of Moonbase Alpha stumbling across a sinister graveyard of lost spaceships, with a tentacled monstrosity lurking inside it.  Even when I was a kid, I knew Space: 1999 was a deeply silly show, but that episode still scared the crap out of me.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

And one other source of inspiration for The Fleet of Lamvula was the film-work of one of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen…

 

For the next month, The Fleet of Lamvula can be read here, while the main page of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue 144, is accessible here.

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Favourite Scots words, S – part 1

 

© Channel 4 Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Hot on the heels of my post about Robert Burns, here’s the latest in my series about favourite words in Scots, the language Burns wrote in.  Many Scots words begin with the letter ‘S’, so in this instalment I’m only going to list the first half of them.

 

Scaffy (n) – not, as you might expect, a scaffolder, but a streetcleaner or binman.

 

Scheme / Schemie (n) – a scheme is the Scottish word for a housing estate and schemie is the derogatory word for someone who lives on one.  One long-ago Saturday evening, while I was wandering around central Edinburgh, I went past a nightclub and was suddenly accosted by an upset young woman who demanded, “Dae I look like a schemie?”  Her supposed resemblance to a schemie was why the bouncer at the nightclub door had just turned her away.

 

Meanwhile, a much-quoted line from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) comes from Mark Renton when he turns up for a job interview: “They’d rather gie a merchant school old boy with severe brain damage a job in nuclear engineering than gie a schemie wi a Ph. D. a post as a cleaner in an abattoir.”

 

Scooby (n), as in ‘I havenae a Scooby’ – rhyming slang for ‘clue’.  Scooby refers to Scooby Doo, the famous American TV cartoon dog who first appeared in 1969, accompanying some ‘meddling kids’, without whose investigations many, many, many criminals “would have gotten away with it.”  I’ve seen arguments online about whether this started as Scottish rhyming slang and then spread to England, or started as Cockney rhyming slang and spread to Scotland.  But I’m sure I heard it in Scotland back in the 1980s, and it was appearing in Scottish newspapers in the 1990s, so its Caledonian pedigree is pretty venerable.

 

Scrieve (v) – to write.  Accordingly, a scriever is a writer.  “Just been doin’ a wee bit scrievin’ you know,” says Matt Craig, the main character and aspiring scriever in Archie Hind’s Glasgow-set novel The Dear Green Place (1966), which is as good an account of the trials and tribulations facing a working-class person trying to make a name as a writer, and a living from it, as Jack London’s better-known Martin Eden (1909).

 

© Corgi Books

 

Scunnered (adj) – sickened or disgusted.  During the 1980s and 1990s, this word was commonly used in Scotland on the mornings following general elections, when it became clear that a majority of people in Scotland had voted for the Labour Party and a majority of people in the south of England had voted for Maggie Thatcher’s Conservatives.  Guess who ended up ruling Scotland each time?  For a 21st-century variation on this, see the Brexit vote.

 

Sharn (n) – dung.  Yes, Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts may know Sharn as a city that ‘towers atop a cliff above the mouth of the Dagger River in southern Breland’ in the fictional world of Eberron, but in Scots sharn refers to cow-shite.  That’s a warning to fantasy creators.  When you dream up names for your fantasy characters, creatures and places, be sure to check they don’t also mean something embarrassing in Scots.  Now please excuse me while I get back to writing my latest sword-and-sorcery epic wherein Glaikit the Barbarian rescues Princess Jobbie from the clutches of the Dark Lord Pishy-Breeks in the Kingdom of Boak.

 

Shauckle (v) – to shuffle along, barely raising your feet off the ground.

 

Sheuch (n) – a channel for removing wastewater, i.e., a gutter at the side of a street or a ditch at the side of a field. In William McIlvanney’s 1975 novel Docherty, the young hero Conn gets battered by his school’s headmaster for saying to him, “Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch.”  The fact that he doesn’t use the ‘correct’ word, gutter, is seen as ‘insolence’.  Early in the 20th century, when the events of Docherty take place, Scottish schoolkids would be punished for using Scots rather than the King’s English.  The only day in the year when Scots was acceptable in schools was January 25th, Robert Buns’ birthday, when they were made to recite the poetry of their national bard.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

 

Incidentally, in Northern Ireland, where I spent my childhood, a sheuch seemed to be only a ditch.  My dad was a farmer and once or twice I heard him cry, “There’s a cow got stuck in the sheuch!”  And the North Channel – the strip of water above the Irish Sea that separates Scotland and Northern Ireland – was called ‘the Sheuch’ and the land-masses east and west of it termed ‘baith sides o’ the Sheuch.’

 

Shieling (n) – a hut or shelter for animals, usually out in the wilds and / or up in the hills.

 

Shilpit (adj) – thin, pale and weak-looking.

 

Shoogly (adj) – wobbly.  To hang on a shoogly peg means to be in dodgy, precarious or dire circumstances.  Since the arrival of the ineffectual and accident-prone Humza Yousaf as First Minister of Scotland, it’s fair to say the peg the electoral fortunes of the Scottish National Party hang on has been pretty shoogly.

 

Skean–dhu (n) – the Anglicised (or Scotticised) version of the Gaelic term sgian-duhb, meaning the ceremonial dagger that’s tucked behind the top of the hose in male Highland dress.  Considering the popularity of Highland dress at Scottish weddings, and the amount of alcohol consumed at them, it’s always surprised me that the country has avoided having a sky-high death-toll of wedding guests stabbed with skean-dhus in drunken altercations.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Stubborn Stag

 

Skelf (n) – a splinter.

 

Skelp (n / v) – to slap or a slap.  Skelps were often administered by parents and teachers to wayward kids back in the days, fondly remembered by the Daily Mail and Daily Express, when it was believed that assaulting children was good for them.

 

Skite (n / v) – also to strike someone or the blow thereof.  However, a skite is more likely to come from a sharp, stinging cane or stick than the open hand that delivers by a skelp.  Both are nicely onomatopoeic words, in their different ways.

 

Skoosh (n / v) – a squirt or spray of liquid.  A commonly heard exchange in Scottish pubs: “Dae ye want water in yer whisky?”  “Aye, but just a wee skoosh.”

 

Sleekit (adj) – according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, either ‘sleek’ and ‘smooth’ or ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’.  Presumably it was with the first meaning that this word got immortalised in a line of Robert Burns’ 1785 poem To a Mouse: “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie…”  Nowadays, it’s used mainly with the ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’ application.  I can think of many politicians I’d describe as sleekit, but I won’t mention any names.

 

From members.parliament.uk

 

Smeddum (n) – in physical terms, a powder.  However, smeddum has also come to mean the kernel or essence of something, and presumably from that to mean its vigour, spirit, determination or grit too.  Robert Burns – him again – had the first meaning in mind when he wrote about ‘fell, red smeddum’, possibly referring to red precipitate of mercury, in his 1785 poem To a Louse.  Whereas Lewis Grassic Gibbon was thinking of smeddum’s spiritual denotation when he made it the title of his most famous short story, about a hard-working Scottish matriarch called Meg Menzies who takes no shit from anyone.  As Meg herself says: “It all depends if you’ve smeddum or not.”

 

Smirr (n) – a drizzly rain falling in small droplets.  This sad, ghostly word perfectly describes the sad, ghostly semi-rain that sometimes seems to envelop Scotland’s landscapes 365 days of the year.

 

Snaw (n) – snow.  Like snaw aff a dyke is a simile commonly used to describe something that disappears, or is disappearing, super-fast: for example, jobs for life, polar icecaps, cashiers in supermarkets, CD and DVD drives in laptops, Twitter’s credibility after Elon Musk took it over, and Liz Truss premierships.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

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Seven reasons why Robert Burns still rocks

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ron Waller

 

This is a revised and expanded version of a piece I had published one January 25th in the Arts section of Concrete, the students’ newspaper at the University of East Anglia, where I did a Master’s Degree many years ago.

 

Tonight, whisky will be guzzled, haggis devoured, bagpipes blasted and Scots-language poetry recited with gusto at thousands of special suppers and get-togethers around the globe.  This is because today, January 25th, is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard and one of its most popular contributions to international culture.

 

Why, more than two-and-a-half centuries after he died at the age of 37, is Robert Burns such big deal?  Here are some reasons.

 

One.  Burns was a champion of the common man.  Born in humble circumstances, as one of seven children to a farmer in Ayrshire, he was much more in tune with the ordinary masses than any of his literary contemporaries.  The American poet Waldo Emerson described him as the poet of ‘the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity’.  The fullest expression of his egalitarian instincts was the song A Man’s a Man for a’ That (1795), which was adopted as an anthem by the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.  That, however, highlights an uncomfortable fact…

 

In 1786, Burns came within a hair’s breadth of travelling to Jamaica and taking up a job-offer as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation – run on slave labour.  Burns’ defenders argue that as a young man at the time, pre-fame, facing destitution, and desperate to get out of Scotland, he probably didn’t consider the hideous moral implications of the job he was about to undertake.  Also, by 1792, he seemed aware enough of slavery’s horrors to pen The Slave’s Lament, which begins: “It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral / For the lands of Virginia-ginia, O.“  But the issue is murkier still, because Burns’ authorship of The Slave’s Lament has been disputed.

 

Anyhow, later, socialists claimed Burns as one of their own.  A 1929 translation of his works into Russian sold a million copies and the Soviet Union honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1954.  However, Burns obviously had appeal for capitalists too, for there are allegedly more statues of him in North America than of any other writer.

 

Two.  Burns was a songwriter too.  Indeed, if anything, he is more pervasive as a songwriter than as a poet.  In addition to A Man’s a Man…, he put Auld Lang Syne on paper in 1788 – which, by virtue of being belted out at New Year celebrations everywhere, is arguably the most universally-sung song in the world.  In Japan it is played at everything from high school graduation ceremonies to evening closing-time in department stores.

 

Three.  Burns wasn’t afraid to criticise the moral and religious mores of his time.  His contempt for the censorious regime of Scotland’s Presbyterian Church was expressed most famously in Holy Willie’s Prayer (1785), wherein a supposedly pious pillar of the church prays to God and unwittingly reveals himself as a scheming, bitter, drunken hypocrite.  Particularly pathetic are his pleas to be forgiven for his lechery, which has targeted ladies by the name of Meg (“And I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg / Again upon her”) and ‘Leezie’s lass’ (“…that Friday I was fou / When I cam near her”).  John Betjeman was so impressed by the conceit that he borrowed it for his 1940s poem In Westminster Abbey.

 

Four.  Burns has a massive cult that keeps his memory alive.  The first Burns societies began to congregate in his honour in about 1800, four years after his death. In 1859, the first centenary of his birth, almost 900 events were staged – 60 of them taking place outside Britain and the US.  Today, Burns societies are to be found everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo and from Winnipeg to Jakarta.

 

It’s claimed that the Russians have more such societies than even the Scots do.  Well, in the unlikely of event of Vladimir Putin sticking his head into a Burns supper this evening, I hope he’s regaled with Burns’ 1792 rewrite of the song Ye Jacobites by Name, whose anti-war lyrics include: “What makes heroic strife? / To whet th’ assassin’s knife / Or hunt a parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Melissa Highton

 

Burns suppers on January 25th are marked by lusty recitals of his greatest poems, speeches and copious consumption of whisky and haggis.  Praised as the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’ in Burns’ Address to a Haggis (1786), haggis is surely the only offal-based foodstuff to have a piece of world-class literature written in its honour.  No other writer is commemorated by a yearly celebration on this scale.  Dublin’s James Joyce-themed Bloomsday on June 16th doesn’t come close.

 

Five.  Burns invented the concept of the doomed, decadent romantic poet.  Long before Byron and Shelley were painting the towns of Europe red and proving themselves mad, bad and dangerous to know, Burns had earned himself a mighty reputation for dissipation, both in the pub and in the bedchamber.  His love of strong drink is obvious in poems like John Barleycorn (1782) while his promiscuity led to him siring at least a dozen children with at least four different women – a common jibe at the time was that you could see his face in every pram on Edinburgh’s Princes Street.

 

Six.  Burns is controversial.  And no doubt the arguments that have raged about him over the centuries have helped keep his fame alive.  Much debate has centred on whether or not someone with Burns’ obvious character flaws deserves such veneration.  At the beginning of 2009, just before the 250th anniversary of his birth, right-wing Scottish historian Michael Fry caused a storm when he denounced Burns as a ‘racist misogynist drunk’ who didn’t deserve to be presented to people as a role model.  Fry sounded a bit like a rock-and-roll era parent expressing concern about the examples the likes of Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Liam Gallagher, Pete Docherty, Amy Winehouse, etc., set for young people.

 

Seven.  Burns’ work has had a considerable influence on the English language and on English-language culture.  Here are a few examples:

 

Proverbs:

  • The best laid plans of mice and men will go astray (‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ / from 1785’s To a Mouse).
  • To see ourselves as others see us (‘To see ousel’s as ithers see us’ / from 1786’s To a Louse).
  • There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing (attributed to Burns).

 

Phrases:

 

Burns-inspired titles:

  • John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1937).
  • R. James’ short story, reckoned by some to be the greatest ghost story in English literature, O, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad (1904) – which is also the title of a 1793 Burns poem.
  • Ken Loach’s film, Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – which is also the title of a 1791 Burns song.
  • The Vin Diesel car-chase / street-racing movie The Fast and the Furious (2001) – ‘fast and furious’ was a phrase Burns coined in Tam O’Shanter.

 

All right, with that that last example, the producers may not have been aware of the Robert Burns connection when they chose the title.

 

© National Trust for Scotland / Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

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It’s the pits for Rab Foster

 

© Literary Rebel, LLC

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a story published in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly.  It’s entitled Pit of the Orybadak and is perhaps the bleakest, most violent and most despairing thing I’ve written as Rab Foster.  There’s a high body-count and although the hero Drayak Shathsprey (who’s appeared in several other of my published tales) makes it out alive, I put him through hell in this story.  No doubt the dark tone reflects the mood I was in when I wrote it, when I felt particularly fed up by events happening in the world and was losing my faith in humanity.

 

However, a kind reviewer on goodreads.com has described Pit of the Orybadak as “a harrowing tale of loss, survival, and monsters in the dark… a classic dark fantasy story.”  So, thank you for that, kind reviewer.

 

Pit of the Orybadak appears in Issue 25 of Savage Realms Monthly, which is the December 2023 edition and explains the image of the jovial barbarian wearing a Santa hat and brandishing a tankard of ale on its cover.  A slight delay in the publishing schedule meant that it didn’t become available until very recently.  You can purchase the paperback and kindle editions here.

 

And by the way, the issue also contains an interview with me, as Rab Foster, in which I identify my favourite sword-and-sorcery story ever.

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The literary Bond revisited: Colonel Sun

 

© Vintage Publishing

 

Here’s the latest in a series of posts wherein I look at the original James Bond novels and short-story collections from the 1950s and 1960s.  This time, however, I’m looking at a Bond novel that wasn’t written by Ian Fleming.  It’s 1968’s Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis.  Why?  Well, I slagged off Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) on this blog a few months ago, and I feel a bit guilty about giving poor old Kingsley a (verbal) kicking then.  So here’s my take on Colonel Sun, which I believe is much better.

 

In some ways, the 21st century has been a difficult time for James Bond.  On the film front, the new century began with one of the worst Bond movies ever, 2002’s Die Another Day, an ignoble end to Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the role.  And, though the franchise was steadied with the recruitment of Daniel Craig and a more serious, mature and sensitive approach to the character, trouble never felt far away.  See, for example, the long periods between productions – six years from Spectre (2015) to No Time to Die (2021) – and Craig’s well-publicised reluctance to play Bond again after Spectre.  And the fact that, in the most recent movie, the filmmakers took the unprecedented step of – MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD! – killing him off at the end.

 

Plus, there’s been much talk in recent years about Bond’s ‘obsolescence’.  The thinking goes that as a privileged, white, stuck-up, sexist macho-man rooted in the early decades of the Cold War, Bond has become embarrassingly anachronistic in our more socially-aware era today.  Laurie Penny, for instance, said as much in a New Statesman article in 2015.  There’s a parallel argument that in the high-tech modern world Bond is obsolescent too.  This was even referred to in Spectre, when Bond is faced with a new, tech-obsessed superior called C (Andrew Scott).  C vows to “bring British intelligence out of the dark ages, into the light” and argues that “an agent in the field”, like 007, can’t “last long against all those drones and satellites.”

 

And yet, no matter how unfashionable Bond might be nowadays, you can’t deny that well-regarded modern writers are still keen to follow in Ian Fleming’s footsteps and have a go at writing new Bond novels.  These include Sebastian Foulkes (with 2008’s Devil May Care), Jeffery Deaver (with 2011’s Carte Blanche), William Boyd (with 2013’s Solo) and Anthony Horowitz (with 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and a Day).  Long before Foulkes, Deaver, Boyd and Horowitz got in on the act, though, another writer attempted to construct a novel around Fleming’s legendary superspy.

 

In 1968, just four years after Fleming’s death, Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond adventure called Colonel Sun and published it under the pseudonym Robert Markham.  By then, Amis was a big noise in British letters thanks to works like 1954’s Lucky Jim and 1960’s Take a Girl Like You.  I should say my 2015 Vintage Classics edition of Colonel Sun makes no mention of Robert Markham on its cover and advertises it unapologetically as a Kingsley Amis novel.  Anyway, before I offer my thoughts on Colonel Sun, here’s another spoilers warning.  There are lots of them ahead…

 

© Ian Fleming Publications

 

The novel is set a little while after the events of Fleming’s Bond swansong, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), which Amis is rumoured to have polished up when Fleming died before he could revise it himself.  It begins with an audacious attempt by some unidentified villains to kidnap both Bond and his secret-service boss M.  They’re only half-successful.  M is abducted and whisked out of England, but Bond manages to elude his would-be abductors and is tasked with tracking M down.  He soon homes in on an island in the Aegean Sea.  There, M is being held by a Chinese officer, ‘Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army’.

 

The Colonel has a dastardly plan.  The Soviet Union is hosting a secret international conference in the area and Sun plans to destroy it and the delegates in a mortar attack, the blame for which will then be pinned on Britain.  Sun intends to make it look like one of the last mortars blew up accidentally, before firing, and leave Bond and M’s dead, but still identifiable, bodies in the wreckage.  Thus, China will benefit from the discrediting not only of the USSR for sloppy security, but also of the UK for warmongering.

 

To rescue M and thwart Sun’s scheme, Bond joins forces with a woman called Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek communist who’s been working for the Soviets; and a Greek World War II veteran called Niko Litsas who, after fighting Nazis, fought communists during the 1946-49 Greek Civil War.  Amis discreetly skates over Britain’s sorry role in this episode of Greek history.  In 1944 the British government decided to back the anti-communist faction in Greece against the left-leaning one, even though the former faction contained many Nazi sympathisers and collaborators and the latter contained many partisans who’d fought for the Allies.  Despite their ideological differences, the trio bond – ouch – and are soon prowling the Aegean Sea in a vessel called The Altair whilst figuring a way of taking the fight to Sun and his many henchmen.

 

Amis’s plot is generic and a few things don’t make sense.  For example, why does Sun want to plant the elderly and normally deskbound M at the scene of the crime?  This is the literary M we’re talking about, not the feistier and more empowered cinematic version played by the likes of Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes.  Wouldn’t it look more believable if the body of another, physically-able British agent was found there next to Bond’s?  It’s hard to see this as anything more than a perfunctory excuse for the novel’s main gimmick, the kidnapping of M.

 

But Colonel Sun is still good entertainment and feels more credible as a Bond novel than the other non-Fleming Bonds I’ve read.  For one thing, unlike the rather bland villains in most of the 21st century Bond-novels I mentioned above, Colonel Sun makes a memorable baddie.

 

© Methuen

 

Yes, he belongs to a long tradition of Oriental supervillains found in pulpy colonial adventure fiction – Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books being the most notorious examples.  He’s not even the first bad guy in the Bond canon to follow this dubious blueprint, an honour that belongs to the titular character of Fleming’s Dr No (1957).  But Sun is splendidly eccentric.  He’s irritatingly polite and addresses friends and foes alike by their first names.  He also sees himself as an Anglophile: “Sun did not share his colleagues’ often-expressed contempt… for everything British.  He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.”

 

Then there’s his penchant for torture.  Near the novel’s end, just before he lays into Bond with an array of kitchen utensils (‘knives, skewers, broom-straws’), he explains: “True sadism has nothing whatever to do with sex.  The intimacy I was referring to is moral and spiritual, the union of two souls in a rather mystical way.”  Later still, he surprises us when he confesses to Bond that “I didn’t feel like a god when I was torturing you back there.  I felt sick and guilty and ashamed.”

 

Admittedly, I could have done without the linguistic quirk that Amis gives him.  Thanks to his “quick ear and passionate desire to learn” English and a “total ignorance of the British dialect pattern”, he’s ended up with a bizarre accent combining the “tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London…”  As a result, every time Colonel Sun opens his mouth in the book, I imagine his voice sounding like an Artificial Intelligence one created from a dataset involving Liam Gallagher, Billy Connolly, Ringo Starr, Van Morrison, Jimmy Nail, Charlotte Church and Ray Winstone.

 

Colonel Sun also feels like a proper Bond novel because Kingsley Amis’s authorial voice doesn’t sound that different from Ian Fleming’s.  Putting it more crudely, it feels closer to the originals than the modern pastiches do because Amis was as much of a curmudgeonly snob as Fleming was.  By the 1960s, Bond’s rarefied world of Bentleys, dinner jackets and private members’ clubs were on their way out; and Amis bellyaches about it as you’d imagine Fleming would.  When Bond drives through some English farmland, he writes: “Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been.  As if to contradict this idea, there appeared ahead of him a B.E.A. Trident newly taken off from London Airport, full of tourists bringing their fish-and-chip culture to the Spanish resorts, to Portugal’s lovely Algarve province, and now… as far as Morocco.”

 

Also activating Amis’s Licence to Grump is the prospect of the great, fish-and-chip-loving unwashed discovering the Greek islands.  Describing a waterfront, he observes: “At the near end were whitewashed cottages with blue or tan shutters and doors, then a grocery, a ship’s supplier, harbour offices, a tavérna with a faded green awning.  No neon, no cars, no souvenir shops.  Not yet.”

 

Still, some aspects of Colonel Sun are surprisingly liberal, considering Amis’s cranky right-wing politics.  Adriane, the book’s heroine, is resourceful and able to look after herself and Bond comes across as less of a sexist boor than one might expect.  Meanwhile, some Soviet characters are depicted sympathetically: for example, Gordienko, Moscow’s man in Athens, who believes Bond’s warnings that something fishy is afoot and will have bad consequences for both their countries; and Yermolov, the pragmatic, vodka-loving dignitary who at the end expresses the USSR’s gratitude to Bond for foiling Sun’s plan.  Indeed, Yermolov feels like a prototype for the tough but avuncular General Gogol, the KGB head played by Walter Gottel, who appeared in every Bond movie from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) to The Living Daylights (1987).  In Colonel Sun, Yermolov even offers Bond the Order of the Red Banner; just as Gogol awards Roger Moore (‘Comrade Bond’) the Order of Lenin at the end of 1985’s A View to a Kill.

 

© Eon Productions

 

But before we assume that old Kingsley has gone all hippy-dippy and peace-and-love, we should bear in mind that the Soviets are the good guys here only comparatively – because the bad guys are the Chinese.  The novel even postulates that the West and the Soviet Union are on the brink of working together because of the increasing threat posed by China.  Richard Nixon’s jaunt to China in 1972 must have knocked that notion on the head.  Happily, by the time of the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which has Pierce Brosnan joining forces with Michelle Yeoh to take on Rupert Murdoch, sorry, an evil, fictional media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce, the Bond-verse had decided that the Chinese could be good guys too.

 

While Colonel Sun has never been filmed, it’s interesting how a few of its ideas have turned up in the Bond movies.  The kidnapping of M was a key plot element in 1999’s Tomorrow Never Dies, while a villain called Colonel Tan-Sun Moon features in Die Another Day.  And if Colonel Sun’s musings during the book’s climactic torture scene sound familiar – “Torture is easy, on a superficial level.  A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror from the experience, but it’s still going on at a distance…  a man lives inside his head.  That’s where the seed of his soul is…  So James, I’m going to penetrate to where you are.  To the inside of your head….” – it’s because they were used as dialogue in Spectre, during the scene where Christoph Waltz violates Daniel Craig’s skull using a torture device that looks like a dentist’s drill on a robotic tentacle.

 

In Spectre, Waltz’s character is revealed as being none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Having James Bond’s great arch-enemy borrow his best lines?  Colonel Sun would have been flattered.

 

© Eon Productions